Corona vaccination: Headache is “wrongly attributed to the vaccine” in half of all cases
Created: 01/24/2022, 08:48
By: Juliane Gutmann
Headaches and fatigue are often reported after a corona vaccination.
An American-German research group assumes that only half of the cases are due to the Covid immunization.
© Andriy Popov/Imago
Tiredness, chills and cold symptoms: Vaccination can be associated with side effects.
But in many cases the nocebo effect is probably behind it.
The approval studies by the vaccine manufacturers Biontech, Moderna, Astrazeneca and Johnson & Johnson show that physical symptoms such as pain at the injection site can occur after the corona vaccination. In the vast majority of cases, these are temporary, mild side effects that are quickly overcome.
Maybe you were affected yourself or have friends and acquaintances who report tiredness, headaches, armache and fever after the vaccination
. A common explanation for this: The immune system is stimulated by the ingredients of the corona vaccines to produce corona antibodies.
But a German-US research group has now found another cause that explains symptoms after corona immunization.
This is the so-called
nocebo effect
, also known as the negative placebo effect.
Where the placebo effect describes that a sham treatment achieves a positive effect in the patient simply because the patient expects it, the opposite happens in the case of the nocebo effect.
This is the case, for example, when a person who has been vaccinated against corona firmly assumes that the vaccination will cause them symptoms and this then occurs.
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More than 50 percent of vaccine reactions are attributed to the reverse placebo effect
As the Pharmazeutische Zeitung (PZ) informs, about every third placebo corona vaccination causes undesirable effects, although no active substance was administered.
Against this background, the research team led by Dr.
Julia Haas from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston assumes
that more than half of all side effects after the corona vaccination could be attributed to the nocebo effect
.
This is also indicated by the meta-analysis by the researchers, which was published in the journal
JAMA Network Open
.
As part of the analysis, the data of 45,380 test persons were evaluated. 22,578 received a placebo injection, the rest a corona vaccination. “After the first dose, 35.2 percent of placebo recipients experienced systemic adverse events, with headache (19.3 percent) and fatigue (16.7 percent) being the most common. After the second dose, 31.8 percent of placebo recipients reported systemic adverse events.
They came to the conclusion that nocebo reactions were responsible for 76.0 percent of systemic side effects after the first dose of Covid-19 vaccine and 51.8 percent after the second dose.
According to the PZ, the skin, respiratory tract, gastrointestinal tract, cardiovascular system and nervous system in particular can be involved in a systemic reaction.
In a Harvard Medical School press release titled "Power of Placebo," lead author Professor Dr.
Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School and director of the Placebo Studies Program at Beth Israel Deaconess describes the nocebo phenomenon as follows: "Nocebo symptoms such as headache and fatigue - which we have shown are particularly sensitive to nocebo - are reported in many information brochures as one of the most common adverse effects listed after the Covid-19 vaccination.
There is evidence that this type of information can lead people to mistakenly attribute everyday sensations to the vaccine
."
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